THE COMPLETE STORIES by Truman Capote
(Penguin Books 2005) - Book Review
(Penguin Books 2005) - Book Review
Reviewed by Dan Schneider
Of
the twenty stories that comprise the surprisingly slim (for a writer of his
renown) ‘The Complete Stories Of Truman Capote’, only two can be classified as
great, or at least excellent, while only two others can be called good. The
rest are not even passable, despite the occasional memorable image or
well-crafted sentence, for the narratives are weak, trite, and transparent.
Now, this ration of twenty and ten percent success in goodness and greatness is
one that if it were sustained throughout published literature, would leave our
time to be considered a Golden Age. However, since the only things I read of
Capote’s, before this book, were the excellent ‘In Cold Blood’, and the two
Christmas tales, ‘A Christmas Memory’ and ‘One Christmas’, this book’s tales
were a profound disappointment. More so considering the very two Christmas
tales were the only arguably great tales, and the only good tales were also holiday
stories: ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’ and ‘Jug Of Silver’. One might argue, from
this quartet, that Capote was the greatest occasional short story writer of all
time. The rest of his work, however, ranged from passable to atrocious.
Part of the reason for this reality,
however, is that the span of the tales range from 1943 to 1982, with twelve of
the stories written in the 1940s - what might be called Capote’s apprentice
period. Only ‘Jug Of Silver’ dates from that era. Reading those first dozen
tales is to watch a great writer in utero, and growing. The first four
stories are absolutely terrible- no plot, no point, no memorable scenes,
characters, nor phrases. The first, 1943’s ‘The Walls Are Cold’, is a dull,
trite tale about a young, flirtatious socialite, yet even this early the
concerns and milieux are archetypically Capotean:
“The
hostess straightened her trim, black dress and pursed her lips nervously. She
was very young and small and perfect. Her face was pale and framed with sleek
black hair, and her lipstick was a trifle too dark. It was after two and she
was tired and wished they would all go, but it was no small task to rid
yourself of some thirty people, particularly when the majority were full of her
father’s scotch. The elevator man had been up twice to complain about the
noise; so she gave him a highball, which is all he is after anyway. And now the
sailors…oh, the hell with it”.
Even its trite end is predictably
Capotean:
“She
nodded and the hostess turned back down the corridor and went into her mother's
room. She lay down on the velvet chaise lounge and stared at the Picasso
abstract. She picked up a tiny lace pillow and pushed it against her face as
hard as she could. She was going to sleep here tonight, here where the walls
were pale rose and warm”.
Yet, even if one looks at the final eight
tales, that span over thirty years, only three of them succeed, and do so when
recalling true memories- or so Capote claimed. He even termed them his
“nostalgic fictions”. It’s always been assumed that Capote turned to longer
forms, novellas and novels, because his great financial success with ‘Other
Voices’, ‘Other Rooms’, ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’, ‘The Grass Harp’, and ‘In
Cold Blood’, made shorter forms less appealing. But, let’s give the writer his due
in knowing his strengths and weaknesses. My guess is Capote knew he was not cut
out to be a short fictionist, and was lucky that his financial success
basically forestalled any real need to ‘prove’ himself in that genre.
Most of the tales deal with an assortment
of prototypically Southern ‘white trash’ problems circa the 1920s through
1940s: religion, sexual crises, circus freaks, bullying elders, train rides to
unknown parents, eccentrics galore, racism, social faux pas, romantic failures,
poverty, schemes and scams, and silver jugs and diamond guitars. In many of the
earlier tales the symbolism Capote uses is obvious, heavy-handed, and downright
weak - an old mink stole that must be sold, a beautiful guitar that calms
savage hearts, alluring but dangerous strangers, and, worst of all, the
stereotype of the tormented artist wannabe, who endures the daily hell of
preachers, accountants, gossips, and crooks.
For example, in ‘The Shape of Things’,
from 1944, two women and a soldier on a train are threatened by another soldier
heading home after being shellshocked. ‘A Mink Of One’s Own’, also published in
1944, has a woman visited by an old friend, back from Europe, after the Second
World War. The friend gives a coat to the woman, and she pays four hundred dollars
for it. Later, the woman realizes the coat is rotten. ‘Miriam’ is a 1945 tale
that is steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition, although set in New York
City, about a little girl named Miriam who haunts an old widow of the same
name. Is it the woman’s earlier self? Is it in her mind? Is she insane or
haunted? It’s a typically Rod Serlingesque tale of the sort that dominates
Capote’s 1940s oeuvre. ‘My Side Of The Matter’, also from 1945, has a Capotan
narrator who is a prisoner of his wife and her family. ‘Preacher’s Legend’,
also from 1945, follows a stupid old black man, who is hunted by two hunters he
deludes himself into believing one of them is Jesus Christ. ‘A Tree of Night’,
again from 1945, follows an innocent student, sitting on a train next to a
slutty woman and her mute companion, who engages an old childhood fear. ‘The
Bargain’, a highly trumpeted previously unpublished story from 1950, follows a
suburban housewife’s ups and downs that parallels the earlier ‘A Mink Of One’s
Own’, except that the recipient of the coat is a bit more savvy, and aware of
the reality of the deal:
“Still
trailing the clumsy coat, she went to a corner of the room where there was a
desk and, writing with resentful jabs, made a check on her private account: she
did not intend that her husband should know. More than most, Mrs. Chase
despised the sense of loss; a misplaced key, a dropped coin, quickened her
awareness of theft and the cheats of life”.
‘A Diamond Guitar’, another 1950 tale, is
about a musical instrument that is the prized possession of a convict, and one
of the few early tales that is not awful.
All of these tales have one, or at best,
two dimensional characters that suffer and are put out of their misery, one way
or the other, usually by simply accepting it - the cruelest form of spiritual
death. These tales most remind me of a cross between Eudora Welty and Flannery
O’Connor, lacking the brocaded, inert nature of Welty’s tales, and not quite as
grotesqued as O’Connor’s overrated stories. The few later tales are better, on
the whole, but 1975’s ‘Mojave’ is another trite clunker about the estrangement
of lovers:
“That
is the reason I have to kill him. He could never have loved me, not if he could
ignore my enduring such hell. He says, ‘Yes, I love you Jaime; but Angelita,
this is different.’ There is no difference. You love or you do not. You destroy
or you do not. But Carlos will never understand that. Nothing reaches him,
nothing can- only a bullet or a razor.
She wanted to laugh, at the same time she
couldn't because she realized he was serious and also because she well knew how
true it was that certain persons could only be made to recognize the truth, be
made to understand, by subjecting them to extreme punishment.
Nevertheless she did laugh, but in a
manner that Jaime would not interpret as genuine laughter. It was something
comparable to a sympathetic shrug. ‘You could never kill anyone, Jaime.’
He began to comb her hair; the tugs were
not gentle, but she knew the anger implied was against himself, not her.
‘Shit!’ Then: ‘No. And that’s the reason for most suicides. Someone is
torturing you. You want to kill them but you can’t. All that pain is because
you love them, and you can’t kill them because you love them. So you kill
yourself instead.’”
Ugh! Fortunately, his four holiday tales –
‘Jug Of Silver’, ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’, ‘One Christmas’, and most of all,
the justly celebrated ‘A Christmas Memory’, represent a quantum leap upward. ‘A
Christmas Memory’ is so chock full of great scenes and paragraphs that it seems
to differ as fundamentally from the rest of Capote’s short fiction corpus as
Robert Frost’s titanic poem ‘Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening’ does from
the rest of his poetry, in both quality and tone. It starts with this great, rich
and emotionally resonant, opening:
“Imagine
a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years
ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great
black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a
fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the
fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing
at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater
over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen;
but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her
face is remarkable- not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun
and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored
and timid. ‘Oh my,’ she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, ‘it’s
fruitcake weather!’
The person to whom she is speaking is
myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones,
and we have lived together- well, as long as I can remember. Other people
inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and
frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We
are each other’s best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was
formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still
a child. She is still a child.”
Buddy and his cousin, who is likely the
woman named Sook Faulk, from a few other of the tales, have good and bad, light
and dark times, and the tale tells how these two eccentrics- a shy introverted
boy and a weird old woman- help each other through life. Here is a typical
description of their Southern survival:
“We
eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow.
Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron,
ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pine-apple, rinds and raisins and
walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices,
flavorings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home”.
The tale details such elementally rich
details as the old cousin’s superstitions and desire to have Buddy watch movies
for her and tell her of them, to save the strain on her eyes, and then we get
the sundering of the past, and the tale ends with this extremely powerful and
moving coda on the death of Buddy’s old cousin:
“This
is our last Christmas together.
Life separates us. Those who Know Best
decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a miserable
succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer camps. I have
a new home too. But it doesn’t count. Home is where my friend is, and there I
never go.
And there she remains, puttering around
the kitchen. Alone with Queenie. Then alone. (‘Buddy dear,’ she writes in her
wild hard-to-read script, ‘yesterday Jim Macy’s horse kicked Queenie bad. Be
thankful she didn’t feel much. I wrapped her in a Fine Linen sheet and rode her
in the buggy down to Simpson's pasture where she can be with all her
Bones....’). For a few Novembers she continues to bake her fruitcakes
single-handed; not as many, but some: and, of course, she always sends me ‘the
best of the batch.’ Also, in every letter she encloses a dime wadded in toilet
paper: ‘See a picture show and write me the story.’ But gradually in her
letters she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the Buddy who died in
the 1880s; more and more, thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a
morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when
she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: ‘Oh my, it's fruitcake weather!’
And when that happens, I know it. A
message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already
received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose
like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on
this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to
see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”
The two other Christmas tales are good,
‘Jug Of Silver’ and ‘One Christmas’ - which rivals its earlier, and more
famous, Christmas predecessor, with an ending just as powerful, albeit less
melancholy. That tale follows the same young boy alone on a trip to New Orleans
to visit his absentee father, and his later recollections about what he missed
out on during that trip - both then, and in the intervening time. ‘The
Thanksgiving Visitor’ is another very good story that follows Buddy, as he and
Sook plan for a Great Depression era Thanksgiving. Sook invites an even poorer
family to their home for supper, thinking a young boy, Odd Henderson, will make
a good pal for Buddy. But, Odd has bullied Buddy at school and Buddy cannot
stand him. He also feels jealousy over Sook’s fussing over Odd’s upcoming
visit. When Odd comes he steals a brooch of Sook’s and Buddy finks on him. Sook
covers for Odd and explains that Buddy’s intent to hurt Odd was worse than
Odd’s thievery borne of poverty. Years go by and Sook’s kindness seems to have
been a turning point in Odd’s life, yet the tale is not moralistic, and
succeeds with a sharp end.
Capote died at the age of 59, in 1984, a withered shell who
looked a good quarter century older - filled with hatred and spite, addicted to
drugs and alcohol, yet somehow won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize for
‘Shut A Final Door’, one of his early pieces of dreck about a plagiarist. Yet,
it is clear from this collection that the man simply was not adept with the
form, save for a few pieces that could more easily be termed memoirs. The rest
of the stories feature ill-formed characters that often veer into caricature,
hazy premises and awfully contrived endings that ring too hollowly of artifice,
and read like Southern Gothic lit lite. Fortunately, the short story form was
merely a practice field for the too few greater works Capote would produce.
Would that other writers’ failures bore such bounty in other fields, Elysian or
made of pulp.
© Dan
Schneider
(Reproduced with permission)
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